SPOTLIGHT

Charissa Shearer: “My Earliest Impulse Was to Act”

Charissa Shearer, who is 25, says she never wanted to be anything but an actress. “Since I was about four years old, I would walk around the house wearing plastic sunglasses, saying ‘Geewhiz,’ even though I wasn’t American.” It’s hardly surprising: the Anglo-Irish beauty is the niece of Daniel Day-Lewis and the daughter of V.F. contributor Tamasin Day-Lewis and the television executive John Shearer. Her grandfather Cecil Day-Lewis was Britain’s poet laureate from 1968 until his death, in 1972. “I was brought up with a strong sense that I must always be myself. I wanted to act to find what is underneath the surface and to discover the things that we can’t talk about but that form who we are. I am fascinated by impulses, and my earliest impulse was to act.” Shearer got her start last year in Stephen Frears’s Philomena and in The Invisible Woman, about Charles Dickens and his much younger mistress, Ellen Ternan. Ralph Fiennes, who stars as Dickens, also directed the movie. Shearer appears as Katey, one of the great author’s 10 children. “I felt such a strong sense of place in Abi Morgan’s script,” she says. “Ralph taught me that everything comes through the eyes in film. He wasn’t intimidating at all. I felt a great respect for him, but I also felt like we were equals.” Shearer, who next appears in the U.K. release All That Remains, knows not to take her lineage for granted. “I have to work as hard as anyone else, because everyone has to prove his or her own worth. That is something I’ve always been taught. In order to have a sustainable career, it can come only from yourself.”